Book Review: Otherlands

In Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands, the paleobiologist reconstructs different ecosystems across deeptime, presenting each period as a fully realized world rather than just a progressive stage in development toward modern times.

So often it seems that when we learn of eons and eras, they are descriptive and fleshed out only as needed to make the connection to where we are today. In Otherlands, Halliday builds an immersive world for each time period. His work is built on a fossil record foundation, but with the advance technology we now have, a much more in depth picture is obtained and what he makes of this information is an immersive experience with vibrant descriptions of the ecosystem, weather conditions, life, death and environmental destruction. Several times I had to remind myself that he wasn’t spinning tales out of whole cloth, but bringing the fossil record to life.

I have spoken of the concept of living books in previous posts – if you are familiar with the educator Charlotte Mason, she spoke often of the need for living books – engaging, narrative-driven texts written by passionate authors that spark the imagination rather than dumping dry facts. Halliday could have written a textbook presenting maps and tables and basic descriptions of the research done over many years and what the fossil record shows, but instead he created a vibrant immersive experience that puts the reader in each time period, experiencing the plants and animals striving for survival, the changing climate, the shifting landscape. As an aside, I listened to the book on Audible and it truly was an immersive experience. But I also ordered the print version, because Halliday does include world maps for the different time periods as well as illustrations of various life that are mentioned in the book.

The immersive experience reminded me of Peter Brannen’s The Story of CO₂ is the Story of Everything, with the vibrant descriptions and the author’s ability to pull the reader in. One difference, however, is that Brannen started his story in deeptime and moved forward to current day, weaving a thread throughout. Halliday instead works backward. He starts at a more recent, more familiar time (around 20,000 years ago), and each chapter presents a step further back through time, ending finally in the Ediacaran.

Halliday accomplishes several things with this approach. He upends the view of the early earth as somehow crude or empty. The landscape and lifeforms may have looked different, but there was life and death, evolution and extinction, creation and destruction.

He also undermines the view of evolution as progressive, inevitably improving over time. Evolution produces organisms that are fitted to their particular circumstances, and not necessarily “better.” From this view, extinction isn’t just something that happens to interupt this thread of life through time, but rather something that is used to clear ecological space and make room for something new.

By presenting each time period as a unique world, Halliday shows that organisms do not evolve in isolation. Plants and animals act on soils, vegetation, sediments, and atmospheres. Relationships drive change forward.

Halliday addresses climate change, and because of his approach of moving backward through deep time, he is able to show how it is a tool used over and over again to transform the planet. Climate change repeatedly changes the conditions under which life exists.

After reaching the Edicarian, Halliday jumps forward to tie this together. Climate change throughout the ages disrupt environmental conditions and affect biological changes, these are profound changes that have happened time and again, reshaping the earth and the life that inhabited it at each stage. Halliday doesn’t make the connection between modern climate change issues and this pattern through deep time to minimize the situation we currently face, but rather to drive home the point that the earth will survive climate change – it has many times – but what the world looks like, and what life looks like on the other side may be drastically different than what it looks like today.

Humans are a very small blip in the timeline, inhabiting only one small “otherland”, that Halliday presented and like many other lifeforms, that have featured in the fossil record, we aren’t safe from extinction.

Chapters/Worlds